The Tooth Fairy (5 page)

‘And that is the meaning of of of . . . Sam, Terry and Clive, I’d like you to stay behind at the end . . . the meaning of the story of the Widow’s Mite.’

The head was cut off all laughter. Sam shuffled uncomfortably, trying to work his cock back inside his trousers before anyone else noticed. The way Phillips had looked at him intimated that he knew.
He knew
Sam had been holding his cock.
He knew
because God had told him. God had told Mr Phillips, and Mr Phillips would tell Linda, and Linda would tell his mother, and his mother would tell his father, and his father would take off his leather belt with the brass buckle and give him a pasting.

This was how God worked.

After Sunday school Mr Phillips lined up the three of them in the vestry as the other children filed out of the south door. They were afraid of Mr Phillips, his geniality and deep-down kindness notwithstanding. His connections with vaster powers intimidated them; and after the event they – at least Sam and Terry – were terrified by the gravity of their offence, specifically by the certainty of its becoming public knowledge.

‘He knows,’ Sam said as they waited for the others to leave. The vestry smelled of beeswax polish and lavender. On the wall opposite was a painting of Jesus crucified between two thieves.

‘He doesn’t,’ said Clive. ‘He can’t.’

‘I think he knows,’ said Terry. ‘I think he does.’

‘Don’t say anything,’ said Clive.

The door opened and Phillips came in. The catch clicked gently as he closed the door behind him. Standing over them with hands on hips, he took off his glasses. ‘Right. I would like to know what it was you found so funny today.’

Silence.

‘Yes, well, I’m quite prepared to stand here all day until you give me an explanation. All day.’

Silence.

‘I’m waiting.’ They all sensed that Phillips had already lost. ‘Come along, Clive, you’re the most sensible one of the three. Giggling like silly little girls. I’m still waiting.’

Clive cleared his throat. ‘Sorry, sir.’

‘I’m not sure I want ‘‘sorry’’. I want an explanation.’

Clive cleared his throat a second time. ‘I think,’ he said, parroting a phrase he’d heard adults use, ‘that we must have found something amusing.’

‘Oh. You think you must have found something amusing, did you?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I see. And what about Jesus?’

‘Sir?’

‘I said, what about Jesus?’

‘Sir?’

‘Yes, what about Him? What about Him when He was dying on the cross for our sins. That’s your sins and my sins. Do you suppose He must have found something amusing?’

The Tooth Fairy also taught Sam how to hyperventilate. It was a trick he took to school. The story even got into the local newspaper.

It was a fine, dry afternoon during the school lunch-break, about ten minutes before the bell was scheduled to call everyone back to class. An aeroplane flew by overhead,
surprisingly low, almost low enough to see the pilot in the cockpit. Sam stood watching after it, squinting into the sky, still mesmerized by the loud, cylindrical drone of the plane long after all the other children had forgotten it. He stood at the edge of the playground and suddenly remembered what the Tooth Fairy had shown him during the night.

Turning back to the playground he caught Clive by the arm. ‘Hey, watch this.’ Designating two other boys to be ready to catch him, he plugged his ears with his fingers and inhaled deeply, very rapidly, until he fainted clean away. The boys caught him, and within a few seconds he recovered consciousness.

‘Hey!’ said Clive, and he too wanted to try. The same thing happened. Then the other two boys each had a go, followed by Terry, and within moments they had an audience of ten or fifteen kids, all waiting to take a turn at the new game. The audience doubled, tripled, until the entire playground was full of kids watching.

Then a strange thing happened. Sandra Porter from Sam’s class suddenly fainted without even hyperventilating. The same thing happened to Janet Burrows and to Wendy Cooper, followed by Mick Carpenter, and then three other girls, and four more boys, until they were all fainting clean away, the entire playground full of kids, over one hundred and sixty on the school roll, all drifting to the ground like petals from a blown rose.

Sam saw teachers running from the school building. Terry and Clive were among the last to fall, and Sam thought he’d better go down with them. He heard the teachers moving among the bodies crying, ‘Stop this!’ and ‘Stop this at once!’ But it was fully three minutes or so before the first children started to recover. Sam opened his eyes briefly and saw, sitting on the fence ringing the school yard and grinning with satisfaction, the Tooth Fairy. Then he was gone.

When the children started to recover, no one seemed able
to offer the teachers any explanation for what had happened. It just became The Day Everyone Fainted. The incident was written up in the Coventry
Evening Telegraph
and described as a case of mass hysteria.

Somehow the episode was never traced back to Sam.

It was a day off school when he preferred not to have a day off school. Life in the Unusual Objects Society was becoming progressively more interesting, and now he was going to have to miss a session when Terry had promised to bring along an unexploded cartridge from his father’s twelve-bore shotgun. Clive had formed the Unusual Objects Society only the week before, recruiting Sam and Terry into membership by producing a Nazi armband: blood-red with a black swastika sewn on to a white disc, it had fallen into Eric Rogers’s possession during the war. Conditions of membership required the production, on a daily basis, of an item of equal or similar interest. Terry, on his day, had brandished a cat’s-eye road reflector, stolen from his father’s workshop. Sam delivered an Egyptian temple token, which, according to
his
father, had come from Christ-knew-where. Terry had promised to produce the shotgun cartridge on the day Sam’s appointment at the eye hospital came up.

To get to the eye hospital required a modest walk to the bus stop, a tedious bus ride into the city and then another considerable hike to reach the hospital. Then back again. Sam’s mother was in no mood for nonsense. When Sam complained for the fifth time that he didn’t want to go to the eye hospital, she trussed him in his duffel-coat, stuffed his head inside its hood and shook the hood until his head spun. He was standing at the bus stop before the world settled down again.

Before the bus arrived, Chris Morris’s souped-up MG Midget scorched past, exhaust cracking out an inordinate roar, heading in the direction of town. Thirty yards beyond the stop the Midget squealed to a halt, paused and reversed back towards them at high speed. The passenger door flipped open and Morris leaned across to offer them a death’s-head smile. Fingering the steering wheel, he revved the accelerator aggressively. Connie looked doubtful.

‘It’s a lift,’ Sam said to his mother, as if the sudden appearance of the sports car was a portent requiring expert interpretation.

Sam climbed into the well behind the driver while his mother did her best to lower herself into the bucket seat with some kind of dignity. As Morris set off at speed she was pressed back into the seat, fumbling at her skirt with her knees in the air. They were half way into town before Morris said anything.

‘She’s mad, you know,’ he declared in a very quiet, controlled voice.

‘Who?’ said Connie.

‘She is. Completely mad. Barking. Expect she’s given you all her side of the story. What women do, isn’t it?’ Morris slammed to a stop at a red light but only at the last moment.

‘She hasn’t said anything to me.’

Sam sat in the back, looking from his mother’s face to Morris’s. The adults conducted their conversation with eyes glued to the road in front of them. The lights changed, Morris slipped into gear and Connie’s knees went up in the air again.

‘Anything she says is a lie. I expect you know that. You women. You know how people are.’

‘Yes.’

‘ALL RIGHT IN THE BACK THERE?’ Morris suddenly bellowed at Sam, as if they were cruising at altitude in an open aeroplane. ‘ALL RIGHT?’

‘Yes,’ Sam answered happily.

‘He’s all right,’ Morris said, his eerie, quiet voice taking over again. ‘He’s all right.’ His fingers gripped the steering wheel. ‘At least.’

‘Just here would be nice,’ said Connie.

‘Huh?’

‘Drop us just here.’

After they climbed out of the car, Connie gripped Sam’s hand, watching the Midget zoom towards the top of the town. ‘Fast,’ said Sam. ‘Mr Morris drives fast. Where’s he going?’

‘Straight to hell,’ said Connie. ‘Don’t you push me in that car again.’

Mr Morris’s lift had made them early for the hospital appointment, so Connie took Sam to the top of the town, to see the hour strike. Under the clock in Broadgate a set of doors flipped open, and a curious, mechanical Lady Godiva, following a horseshoe track, made unsteady passage. Above her head a second mechanical window revealed a wide-eyed Peeping Tom stealing a forbidden glance. Sam was more fascinated by Tom than by the wobbling naked lady. The clock struck.

‘Blinded,’ said Connie.

‘Why?’

‘Looking when he shouldn’t have been looking.’

They made their way from Broadgate to the hospital. Sam’s heart was heavy. He wondered if he too was being blinded for having seen things he should not have seen. Perhaps he was sharing Tom’s punishment for having seen the Tooth Fairy.

On the way, Connie stopped at one of the surviving gates of medieval Coventry. A gargoyle leered at them from the gothic arch overhead. Its teeth were sharpened to points. Sam took Connie’s hand. As they passed through the gate, he
was afraid that when he emerged from the arch on the other side, the world might be irredeemably changed.

‘Is Mickey in the cage or out of the cage? In or out?’ The fat nurse was becoming irritated. She’d put this question to Sam three times, and he was finding himself unable to answer truthfully.

He didn’t like the eye hospital. The waiting room was full of people with patched, plastered or bandaged eyes. Intimidating wall posters admonished people to PROTECT YOUR EYES: NO SPARES. From there he was frog-marched into a small, darkened room where he had to read an eye chart, and thence to a Stygian cavern where a fiendish, metal-mask contraption was settled on the bridge of his nose, and where he was instructed to report on the performance of tiny, winking red and green lights.

‘Are they going to let me go?’

‘Of course they are,’ Connie soothed. ‘Not long now.’

Later he was bullied into another, lighter room, where the fat nurse pushed him into a seat before a table bearing a black box. Fat nurse pressed a switch and the black box was suddenly illuminated, presenting him with an image of Mickey Mouse and an iron cage. Fat nurse held a card at his eye.

‘Is Mickey in the cage or out of the cage?’

A species of binoculars was clamped to the front of the black box. Sam was commanded to look through the binoculars. They had an evil smell, of rubber and metal. Fat nurse did something to make the left glass of the binoculars go blank.

‘Is Mickey in or out?’

Sam was so afraid that his answer was, ‘Yes.’

The nurse sighed deeply. ‘In or out?’

‘In. Yes.’

The left glass opened again. ‘Is Mickey in or out of the cage?’

Sam hesitated. The question presented a problem, in that Mickey was both in
and
out of the cage. He could see two Mickeys, one clearly out of the cage and a second image, slightly hazier but recognizable, inside the cage.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Either,’ said the fat nurse, ‘he’s in or he’s out. Is Mickey in or out?’

Sam held his breath. He knew it was crucially important not to cry. Where was his mother?

He bit his lip and waited. The nurse slammed her pen down on the table. ‘In or out?’ she said. ‘For goodness’ sake, in or out?’

‘In.’

The nurse seemed satisfied. She picked up her pen and ticked a box on her clipboard paper. She changed the glass. ‘Now?’

‘In.’

‘Now?’

‘In.’

‘That’s better. Easy, isn’t it?’ The nurse’s mood had swung dramatically. Sam secretly sighed with relief. ‘In’ seemed to be the correct answer, the one which won everybody’s approval. After a while he was allowed to go.

He was given a seat in an empty corridor and told to wait while Connie spoke with the doctor. A young nurse passed and smiled at him. The minutes passed. Someone sat on the chair next to him, but Sam, lost in his own thoughts, didn’t look up.

‘I feel bad about it,’ said the figure next to him. ‘I feel bad, so I’ve got something for you.’

Sam glanced up. It was the Tooth Fairy. Sam identified the smell from his bedroom when the Tooth Fairy had visited, varied only slightly. Now it was a smell of hay and leather and horse’s sweat. In the daylight the Tooth Fairy looked slightly uglier. Its squint was pronounced, and its short
physique seemed tougher, like something made of wire and coiled springs. ‘You’re a boy,’ said Sam.